When you stop learning you may not die, but you do stop living…or, stated another way thanks to a once-popular song, “Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.” Learning is, for many people, the thrill of life. It keeps old people young, and it turns eager young learners into creative, productive, and “lively” adults.

Sadly for young people, the outdated textbook approach to learning is just not cutting it anymore. It’s BOR-ING!

With TV, videos, 3D games, texting, mobile phones, YouTube, and Facebook available, opening up a big old text book with static photos, mountains of words, deadly graphs, and one-way messaging seems like entering an oppressive child labor camp. It’s just not thrilling; in fact, it’s a turnoff.

And what about adults? Magazines are our textbooks. We turn to our favorite magazine to find out what’s new in the world, especially the worlds that most interest us. Are magazines flourishing? Are they as thrilling as they once were? Some are, but for most people they simply aren’t. Magazines haven’t kept pace with the Internet and all the various mediums I listed above that vie for our attention just like they do for our young people.

The fast-forward technology of the iPad is ushering in both a revolutionary approach to magazines and a simple way to breath the life back into learning.

What would a living magazine or a living textbook look like? Wired magazine gives you a firsthand look, using a video demonstration that shows you how its magazine will look once in the new digital format is finished. Wired is working with Adobe to make its print magazine “come alive” with click-on short films, 360° spin-around graphics, and the ability to dig deep or skim the surface of each article—all with the touch screen magic of the iPad. You really should click here to see what Wired is developing. The magazine says it, and I believe it; it will revolutionize the magazine industry.

Welcome to the Living Textbook.

Once you see what can be done to bring a magazine to life, it’s easy to imagine how that same approach will turn textbooks into wonderful, amazing interactive learning devices that have all the “wow factor” of the iPad. Imagine a textbook that comes alive with video, images, and interactivity. Imagine something that keeps up with you as you grow through life, because it is growing too.

It’s a fact; by the time a published textbook hits a student’s desk, many times the information is already dated. With a living textbook, anytime something new happens it can be updated with new material, lectures, and demonstrations from around the world. New information and new links can take you down amazing rabbit holes or lead you directly to the answer you’re looking for.

If that sounds exiting, imagine how much more inviting learning will become when textbooks are alive, constantly grabbing your attention, responding to your touch, and anticipating your learning needs even before you know what they are.

By the way, these textbooks are already becoming available, more all the time. Leading textbook publishers have made arrangements with ScrollMotion to bring interactive, multimedia-friendly textbooks to the iPad. If you click here, you can see another great example of how the future is already upon us. It’s a demonstration of how newer, more interactive learning is being promoted on something called enTourage eDGe. It’s a handy device that turns an e-reader into a total media tool.

In our work here with The Food Channel® and CultureWaves®, we’re combining the ever-changing “living” information we’re gathering daily with a recipe database that can be personalized and added to over the years—and we’re turning the results into a living textbook on food and cooking. It’s new publishing at its best: active, demonstrable with video, and highly social with the ability to take feedback and respond in real time. Yes, even cookbooks are coming alive, and that, hopefully, means our next generation will learn to cook.

There was a time, not too long ago, when it was feared that computers would win a technological victory over humans and rule with cold, formulaic precision. But humans, being what they are, didn’t let it happen. Humans became creative with the technology—they used it for their own purpose—and that behavior is now reshaping business intelligence and launching a new age.

The Industrial Age is history. The Information Age is not far behind.

Structure is making way for the unstructured. The certainty of 2 + 2 = 4 is giving way to any number of answers. And before artificial intelligence can even be fully realized, human intelligence is trampling it into submission.

If the introduction of the Apple iPad (pictured above) does to media what the iPod did to music—which many predict—human beings are going to win again. It has the potential to make human life more unstructured, less binding, totally media-centric, and fully connected. It’s a tool that will yank people forward away from informational formulas and into the communication crossroads that business simply cannot ignore.

In an article by Brooke Alker titled, “The Next-Generation of Business Intelligence”, he makes the case that structured, internal data can take a business only so far today, and that it must be augmented by evidence from “the most unstructured corners of the Web.” He sees the semantic web filling in the gaps in business intelligence by putting human contribution squarely in the position of helping to forecast the future.

Foresight never comes from what has happened, it springs from what is happening right now, every minute, from every aspect of life.

Business is learning more each day that people are not that easy to control. Formulas, survey data, statistics, predictive calculations—while they all have value, the new business model must allow “life” to have a prominent place in the decision process.

When I refer to “life,” I’m talking about how people direct their lives based on their time, their money, and—most important—their love of what they choose to do. Human desire trumps just about every other aspect of human life as far as dictating behavior, defining human truth, and discovering signposts for the future. If you know peoples’ passions, observe their behavior, and listen to what they’re talking about—you’ll get a peek at what to expect. No 2 + 2 = 4 thinking will ever be as revealing as the human exceptions that prove 2 + 2 = 5.

What the pundits are calling Semantic Intelligence, we call Human Intelligence—the secret to why CultureWaves® is so distinctly different from other intelligence gathering.

I’m often asked, what makes CultureWaves so different? My simple answer is: it’s because we give people the “WHY.” We go to the busy corners of the web where people are congregating; we listen to their conversations; and we report back on their behavior. We have people tagging this “life” through the use of human need-states, emotional attachments, and their own individual thinking. The results form human truths and human intelligence—factors that make business intelligence smarter because it’s based on what’s happening now, not what has happened. It extracts rich meaning and adds new relevance.

People have pirated technology. Their love of individuality and communication is now taking over business in the same way.

When people started building their own web sites in order to share life—their photos, their videos, and their comments—they didn’t do it to start businesses. They did it to communicate. Now business is following their lead as it enters the world of social media thus creating the dawn of the Communications Age. This dramatic shift is why the “life” aspect of CultureWaves is so valuable. It looks at life and applies it to business instead of the other way around. That “other way” was the way it used to work in the Information Age. Do you see that age disappearing? You should. In many ways…it’s already gone.

Does it ever annoy you to see people, mostly young people, endlessly text messaging?

Or, do you find it frustrating typing info into your cell phone, or punching with your stylist, or wearing your fingers to the bone searching the Internet?

Well, all of that is changing with the new Google voice searchand the even more advanced Vlingovoice recognition and processing application.

Those text maniacs are now able to voice enter their message and have it appear on their screen so they can correct it before they send it. Which means they will now annoy you by forcing you to listen to such mundane entries like, “Where are you?” and “I’m at home.” And, of course, you’ll be hearing other people searching the web, asking directions, researching where to go to dinner, and publicly displaying much other information that now remains, gratefully, in the private realm. And, you better get used to it because private is going public in the voice search age. All because it’s easier to speak than type, and easer to talk than write. The quality of the thoughts we’ll be hearing will be subject to how much thinking people actually do before they speak. Which, when you think about it, is always the case.

One blogger, Jan Chipchase, points out that voice search and recognition is going to be a boon to illiterates who will use it everywhere. He says, “You might think that mainstream voice search will be restricted to places where you have a degree of privacy, like say a car or home—but there are a number of reasons why that's not going to be the case: the first is that to some of the world's 800+million illiterate people, voice is the enabler—it opens up a new window to the world…”

He goes on to say that it will be a new way for people to expose themselves to others and I think he’s absolutely right. The world will become one big reality TV show with everyone spouting out their private lives as they search, socialize, and project all by voice. People will boast about their plans, flatter, criticize, chastise, and make verbal mistakes right in front of people that they would never do otherwise.

We already have books on tape so you can listen instead of read, one can only imagine what it will be like when you can just talk instead of write. It will make the office environment quite different. Will we all wear earplugs? And I can’t help but wonder, are there people who can’t read and write who are latent geniuses? Will they surface as people who can think but have never been able to get their thoughts down on paper or screen? Will text-messaging fiends drive each other crazy with their chatter? It’s all part of the new, improved louder world we’re entering now—with ears wide open.

That’s it, from the edge of the world,

Bob

For a little diversion, check out what the BBC is doing with voice and instrument sound. To visit their website, just click here.